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A Dream of Trees Aglow at Night. replace street lights?

Hoping to give new meaning to the term “natural light,” a small group of
biotechnology hobbyists and entrepreneurs has started a project to
develop plants that glow, potentially leading the way for trees that can
replace electric streetlamps and potted flowers luminous enough to read
by.

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Mr. Taylor, left, is lead scientist of the glowing plant project, and Mr. Evans its manager.

The project, which will use a sophisticated form of genetic engineering
called synthetic biology, is attracting attention not only for its
audacious goal, but for how it is being carried out.

Rather than being the work of a corporation or an academic laboratory,
it will be done by a small group of hobbyist scientists in one of the
growing number of communal laboratories springing up around the nation
as biotechnology becomes cheap enough to give rise to a do-it-yourself
movement.

The project is also being financed in a D.I.Y. sort of way: It has attracted more than $250,000 in pledges from about 4,500 donors in about two weeks on the Web site Kickstarter.

The effort is not the first of its kind. A university group created a
glowing tobacco plant a few years ago by implanting genes from a marine
bacterium that emits light. But the light was so dim that it could be
perceived only if one observed the plant for at least five minutes in a
dark room.

The new project’s goals, at least initially, are similarly modest. “We
hope to have a plant which you can visibly see in the dark (like
glow-in-the-dark paint), but don’t expect to replace your light bulbs
with version 1.0,” the project’s Kickstarter page says.

But part of the goal is more controversial: to publicize do-it-yourself
synthetic biology and to “inspire others to create new living things.”
As promising as that might seem to some, critics are alarmed at the idea
of tinkerers creating living things in their garages. They fear that
malicious organisms may be created, either intentionally or by accident.

The project “will likely result in widespread, random and uncontrolled
release of bioengineered seeds and plants produced through the
controversial and risky techniques of synthetic biology,” the two groups
said in their letter demanding that Kickstarter remove the project from
its Web site.

They note that the project has pledged to deliver seeds to many of its
4,000 contributors, making it perhaps the “first-ever intentional
environmental release of an avowedly ‘synthetic biology’ organism
anywhere in the world.” Kickstarter told the critics to take up their
concerns with the project’s organizers. The Agriculture Department has
not yet replied.

Antony Evans, the manager of the glowing plant project, said in an interview that the activity would be safe.

“What we are doing is very identical to what has been done in research
laboratories and big institutions for 20 years,” he said. Still, he
added, “We are very cognizant of the precedent we are setting” with the
do-it-yourself project and that some of the money raised would be used
to explore public policy issues.

Synthetic biology is a nebulous term and it is difficult to say how, if at all, it differs from genetic engineering.

In its simplest form, genetic engineering involves snipping a gene out
of one organism and pasting it into the DNA of another. Synthetic
biology typically involves synthesizing the DNA to be inserted,
providing the flexibility to go beyond the genes found in nature.

The glowing plant project is the brainchild of Mr. Evans, a technology
entrepreneur in San Francisco, and Omri Amirav-Drory, a biochemist. They
met at Singularity University, a program that introduces entrepreneurs to futuristic technology.

Dr. Amirav-Drory runs a company called Genome Compiler,
which makes a program that can be used to design DNA sequences. When
the sequence is done, it is transmitted to a mail-order foundry that
synthesizes the DNA.

Kyle Taylor, who received his doctorate in molecular and cell biology at
Stanford last year, will be in charge of putting the synthetic DNA into
the plant. The research will be done, at least initially, at BioCurious, a communal laboratory in Silicon Valley that describes itself as a “hackerspace for biotech.”

The first plant the group is modifying is Arabidopsis thaliana, part of
the mustard family and the laboratory rat of the plant world. The
organizers hope to move next to a glowing rose.

Scientists have long made glowing creatures for research purposes, including one or more monkeys, cats,pigs, dogs and worms. Glowing zebra fish have been sold in some aquarium shops for years.

These creatures typically have the gene for a green fluorescent protein,
derived from a jellyfish, spliced into their DNA. But they glow only
when ultraviolet light is shined on them.

Others going back to the 1980s have transplanted the gene for
luciferase, an enzyme used by fireflies, into plants. But luciferase
will not work without another chemical called luciferin. So the plants
did not glow unless luciferin was constantly fed to them. In 2010,
researchers at Stony Brook University reported in the journal Plos One
that they had created a tobacco plant that glowed
entirely on its own, however dimly. They spliced into the plant all six
genes from a marine bacterium necessary to produce both luciferase and
luciferin.

Alexander Krichevsky, who led that research, has started a company,
BioGlow, to commercialize glowing plants, starting with ornamental ones,
since it is still impractical to replace light bulbs.

“Wouldn’t you like your beautiful flowers to glow in the dark?” he said,
invoking the glowing foliage in the movie “Avatar.”

Dr. Krichevsky declined to provide more about the products, timetables
or the investors backing his company, which is based in St. Louis.

Whether it will ever be possible to replace light bulbs remains to be
seen and depends to some extent on how much of the plant’s energy can be
devoted to light production while still allowing the plant to grow. Mr.
Evans said his group calculated, albeit with many assumptions, that a
tree that covers a ground area of 10 meters (nearly 33 feet) by 10
meters might be able to cast as much light as a street lamp.

While the Agriculture Department regulates genetically modified plants, it does so under a law covering plant pests.

BioGlow has already obtained a letter
from the department saying that it will not need approval to release
its glowing plants because they are not plant pests, and are not made
using plant pests. The hobbyist project hopes to get the same exemption.

Todd Kuiken, senior research associate at the Woodrow Wilson Center in
Washington, who has been studying the governance of both synthetic
biology and the do-it-yourself movement, said the glowing plant project
was an ideal test case.

“It exposes the gaps and holes in the regulatory structure, while it is,
I would argue, a safe product in the grand scheme of things,” Dr.
Kuiken said. “A serious look needs to be taken at the regulatory system
to see if it can handle the questions synthetic biology is going to
raise.”

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